Scott Tobias

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NPR, The A.V. Club, The Dissolve, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Reveal, The Verge, UPROXX, Variety, Village Voice
For 1,915 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 46% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 51% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 3.9 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Scott Tobias' Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 62
Highest review score: 100 Sansho the Bailiff
Lowest review score: 0 AVPR: Aliens vs Predator - Requiem
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 975 out of 1915
  2. Mixed: 723 out of 1915
  3. Negative: 217 out of 1915
1915 movie reviews
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    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Scott Tobias
    My Brilliant Career
    Through a miracle of timing, Davis landed the lead role in Gillian Armstrong's assured debut feature My Brilliant Career fresh out of performance school, and it's impossible to imagine anyone else playing the part.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 91 Scott Tobias
    The Harder They Come
    While it was ultimately the songs—You Can Get It If You Really Want, Many Rivers To Cross, Pressure Drop, and the title track, among other classics—that carried the day, The Harder They Come remains a powerful testament to their meaning.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 83 Scott Tobias
    Private Fears in Public Places
    Resnais and Ayckbourn care primarily about observing these characters' private and public faces, who they are and who they present themselves as. To that end, they've achieved a mood of enchanting intimacy.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 67 Scott Tobias
    Sin Nombre
    Fukunaga paints better outside the lines, working with cinematographer Adriano Goldman to offer vivid shots of the poverty and despair cutting through Latin America, of gang rituals and territorial skirmishes, and of ordinary people taking dangerous routes to a better life that may be a mirage. Next time, a few rewrites please.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Scott Tobias
    Child's Pose
    Through it all, Gheorghiu finds the perfect pitch between a mother’s love for her child and a kind of pathology.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 91 Scott Tobias
    The Man Who Knew Too Much
    The Man Who Knew Too Much finds the director firmly back in his wheelhouse, extracting all the wit and suspense he can from a pulpy exercise in abduction and conspiracy.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 83 Scott Tobias
    The Pool
    It's a funny, sweet-natured humanist character piece.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation
    Tartakovsky’s instincts are to keep the action moving quickly and let one piece of kid-friendly slapstick tumble into the next, but when the jokes are this consistently uninspired, it doesn’t matter how fast they’re dispensed.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Scott Tobias
    Songs from the Second Floor
    Though the laughs in Songs From The Second Floor tend to stick in the throat, they're also cathartic and oddly comforting, because the world outside the movie theater is bound to look cheerier than the one on the screen.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 83 Scott Tobias
    Animal Crackers
    Animal Crackers leaves the song-and-dance to Groucho in the great "Hooray For Captain Spaulding," sends Harpo running after screaming blondes in the background, and breaks down the fourth wall for a wry Eugene O'Neill parody.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Scott Tobias
    A Touch of Sin
    A Touch Of Sin stumbles in the coda, which makes the themes embedded in its title too explicit, but it’s a bold, invigorating statement from a director who keeps reinventing himself.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 75 Scott Tobias
    Deliver Us from Evil
    When victims and their families talk about having their lives wrecked by a sexually abusive priest in the forceful documentary Deliver Us From Evil, that destruction is as much spiritual as psychological.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 83 Scott Tobias
    The Interrupters
    Witnessing outreach workers intervening in these situations is inspiring enough, but their subtlety and nuance in neutralizing people of different backgrounds and temperaments is especially impressive.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    The Face of an Angel
    Virtually nothing happens in the film that enhances viewers’ understanding of the situation. Winterbottom and company merely survey the scene, kick around a few half-assed moments of atmosphere and suspense, shrug their shoulders, and pack it in for the night.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Scott Tobias
    The Holy Girl
    Adjusting to Martel's style requires patience, but her indirection pays dividends, culminating in an unforgettable final shot that flies in the face of narrative expectations.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Scott Tobias
    Jauja
    Locking into the film’s rhythms requires patience and an abandonment of preconceptions, but it’s nonetheless Alonso’s most accessible work to date, buoyed by spare but lush photography and Viggo Mortensen’s magnetic presence in the lead role. It takes a special kind of charisma to bring viewers along on a journey to nowhere.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Scott Tobias
    The Immigrant
    What really sets The Immigrant apart is how urgent it feels. Historical dramas often have a reserve that comes with perspective, but nearly a full century removed from this story, Gray seems, if anything, more emotionally invested here than in his contemporary dramas.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Scott Tobias
    The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
    Jones directs with all the grit that's associated with his onscreen persona, but Peckinpah would never allow this degree of sentimentality to slip into one of his Westerns. A better comparison might be to Clint Eastwood, another tough-guy actor whose work as a director is often a little soft at the center.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Scott Tobias
    Italian for Beginners
    Sweet-natured and likable to a fault, the film studiously avoids confronting the darker themes of death and religion that bubble up from its story, no matter how central they are to the characters' lives.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Life or Something Like It
    A banal message movie.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 0 Scott Tobias
    Atlas Shrugged II: The Strike
    The specific problem with Part II is that a second act of huffery and puffery don't get it anywhere.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Scott Tobias
    Pain & Gain
    Bay blankets the film in a tone of smug self-awareness that obscures everything but its bald hypocrisy.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Scott Tobias
    Before the Rains
    The one appealing aspect of Before The Rains is that there are no villains, just three characters who are driven first by shared desires, then by a natural impulse for self-preservation that brings them into conflict.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 83 Scott Tobias
    I Stand Alone
    I Stand Alone, Gaspar Noé's raw, corrosive, and relentlessly provocative response—part companion piece, part critique—to Taxi Driver unfolds with rare force and clarity of vision, rarer still for a director's first feature.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 83 Scott Tobias
    Bill Cunningham New York
    It's no insult to say that the fine documentary Bill Cunningham New York resembles one of those minor profiles found in The New Yorker's "Talk Of The Town" section: a slight, glancing, yet subtly wrought slice of New York life. And it seems likely that the exceedingly modest Cunningham would want it that way.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 83 Scott Tobias
    Service (Serbis)
    At its best, Serbis is a vibrant slice of life that establishes this theater as a living organism, nurturing a society of outcasts; it's like "Ship Of Fools" with blowjobs and boil-lancings.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Scott Tobias
    The Sure Thing
    The Sure Thing is queasily old-fashioned, a raunchy road trip without the raunch that nonetheless trades on sex-comedy stereotypes: party animals in Hawaiian shirts, tea-sipping no-fun-niks in neutral-colored sweaters, and a compliant blonde sex doll that is, in fact, a sure thing. The film takes baby steps to something better.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 83 Scott Tobias
    Inside Man
    With juicy supporting roles for Chiwetel Ejiofor and Willem Dafoe as Washington's fellow officers, the film works best when the characters are just sitting back and shooting the breeze, which is what they're doing much of the time. Here, puzzling out a robbery is more fun than stopping it.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Scott Tobias
    Warm Water Under a Red Bridge
    Funny and endearing.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Scott Tobias
    Lore
    If nothing else, Shortland gives Rosendahl a star-making platform on par with Cornish’s in "Somersault": She’s a magnetic screen presence who subtly conveys not only the struggle and guilt inherent to her situation, but also a residue of hate that’s carried over from her parents. The actor, like her character, shoulders a heavy burden.
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